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How One Physicist is Giving Women Scientists the Wikipedia Pages They Deserve

How One Physicist is Giving Women Scientists the Wikipedia Pages They Deserve

Photo credit: Getty Images

September 10, 2018

Posted by Women In STEM Editorial Board

Anyone can edit Wikipedia — and one physicist is wielding that power to give underrepresented scientists their due.

Jess Wade, a postdoctoral research associate at the U.K.’s Imperial College London and longtime STEM diversity advocate, set out this year to write one Wikipedia biography a day to highlight scientists who are women, people of color and LGBTQ. So far, she told Moneyish, she’s up to about 280 pages — including entries for NASA engineer Nagin Cox, crystallographer Oluwatoyin Asojo and Susan Goldberg, the first woman editor of National Geographic.

“There are so many incredible women in science; people of color in science; LGBTQ+ (people in science),” said Wade, 29. “I think that we haven’t done a good enough job at telling the proper stories of the scientists that have contributed to everything we understand about the world around us.”...